The Julius Rosenwald Fund has been largely ignored in the literature of both art history and African American studies, despite its unique focus, intensity, and commitment. Spertus Museum in Chicago has organized an exhibition, guest curated by Daniel Schulman, that presents and explores the work of funded artists as well as the history of the Fund. Through it, and this accompanying collection of essays, illustrations, and color plates, we see the Fund’s groundbreaking initiative to address issues relating to the unequal treatment of blacks in American life. The book constitutes a veritable Who’s Who of African American artists and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, as well as a roll call of modern contributors who represent the leading scholars in their fields, including Peter M. Ascoli, grandson and biographer of Julius Rosenwald, and Kinshasha Holman Conwill, deputy director of the National Museum of African American Art and Culture. With far-reaching influence even today, the Julius Rosenwald Fund stands alongside the Rockefeller and Carnegie funds as a major force in American cultural history.

A Force for Change is the first full-length study of the life and work of one of Oregon’s most dynamic civil rights activists, African American journalist Beatrice Morrow Cannady. Between 1912 and 1936, Cannady tirelessly promoted interracial goodwill and fought segregation and discrimination.

She gave hundreds of lectures to high school and college students and shared her message with radio listeners across the Pacific Northwest. She was assistant editor, and later publisher, of The Advocate, Oregon’s largest African American newspaper. Cannady was the first black woman to graduate from law school in Oregon, and the first to run for state representative. She held interracial teas in her home in Northeast Portland and protested repeated showings of the racist film The Birth of a Nation. And when the Ku Klux Klan swept into Oregon, she urged the governor to act quickly to protect black Oregonians’ right to live and work without fear. Despite these accomplishments—and many more during her twenty-five-year career—Beatrice Cannady fell into obscurity when she left Oregon in about 1938.

A Force for Change illuminates Cannady’s important role in advocating for better race relations in Oregon in the early decades of the twentieth century. It describes her encounters with the period’s leading black artists, editors, politicians, and intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, Oscar De Priest, Roland Hayes, and James Weldon Johnson. It dispels the myth that African Americans played little part in Oregon’s history and enriches our understanding of the black experience in Oregon.

A Force for Change is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of women’s history, gender studies, African American history, journalism history, and Pacific Northwest history. It belongs on the shelf of any reader interested in a richer understanding of the civil rights movement in Oregon and across the country.